Phantom of Blood Alley (11 page)

A single tin bowl doubled up as kitchen sink and wash basin. A mattress bolted to a plank of wood was a table during the day and a bed at night. His washing was draped from the wooden struts of a clothes dryer which hung from the ceiling, while a flat-topped stove beneath provided a means of cooking and dried his clothes at the same time.

‘I always knew those chemicals would be the death of him,’ Miles Morgenstern was saying as he removed a book and a glass of water, and pushed the bedside table across to me as a stool. ‘I warned him often enough …’

‘But aren’t you in the same line of business?’ I asked. ‘The fixing of images from life using chemicals?’

‘Oh, I am, Mr Grimes,’ he said. He was perching on the corner of the table opposite
me, his fingers picking at the mattress ticking beneath. ‘But I use natural substances wherever possible. Gelatine and gum arabic. Egg white. Potato starch.’

I smiled to myself. Eggs and potatoes. It seemed that even his food had more than one use.

‘Of course, there are some chemicals I can’t do without,’ he said, ‘but I use ones that I can rely on, rather than Laurence’s risky experiments.’ He climbed to his feet. ‘Perhaps I could show you, Mr Grimes.’

Unhooking a hanging lantern, he squeezed between the table and the stool, and opened a narrow door at the back of the room. I followed him, and found myself in a long thin attic, its sloping ceilings making me feel as though I was inside the hull of an upturned boat.

Worktops lined both walls, with shelves beneath and storage hooks above. There was a curious musty smell to the air, almost like a farmyard, and as I made my way sideways
down the narrow galley, I thought I heard clucking – an idea confirmed when I came to a chicken coop with three feather-footed bantams pecking at the wire. This must have been how the poultry merchant two streets away came to have Morgenstern’s address.

‘You’ve discovered my girls,’ said Miles Morgenstern with a throaty chuckle. ‘Ruby, Alice and Maud.’ He took a handful of millet and corn from a sack which hung from a hook above, and threw it inside the coop. ‘It’s the white from their eggs I use for my albumen prints.’

‘Albumen prints?’ I said. ‘Not oliphantypes then?’

‘Certainly not,’ Miles Morgenstern said emphatically. ‘I gave those up when I left Laurence to set up on my own. He didn’t like it, but I felt I had to.’ He pointed to the eggs. ‘You must first beat the egg whites to a froth, then add a saturated solution of iodide of potassium. Thirty drops for each egg …’

As he spoke, Miles Morgenstern became more and more animated, his voice increasingly shrill. He was clearly enthralled by the process he was describing.

‘What’re those?’ I asked, pointing to a rack of square plates of glass beside a large, empty vat.

‘Those? Those, I coat with a gelatine mix,’ he said. ‘I make up large batches of the stuff in the vat there. A ratio of fifteen grains of Newton’s patent opaque gelatine to a two-ounce bottle of water, plus eighteen grains of bromide of potassium …’

I inspected the worktops as he continued what was rapidly becoming a lecture, making my way slowly past flat-bottomed trays, stoppered flasks, pairs of scales and racks of pipettes. I came to a pile of paper prints and held one up to the flickering yellow light.

It was the image of a serious-faced boy seated on an oversized armchair, his bony arms clamping a plump black and white Jack
Russell to his chest. The next was a picture of a street singer, her mouth open and eyes gleaming with passion. Next, a juggling clown, his blurred hands and the smear of thrown skittles making the picture look as though it was in motion, and after that a pretty girl wearing a mobcap and apron, a milk ladle in her hand …

I realized that Miles Morgenstern was standing at my shoulder. ‘They’re very good,’ I told him.

‘Thank you, Mr Grimes,’ he said, his face glowing with pride. ‘Every bit as clear and resonant as Laurence’s oliphantypes, although he flew into one of his rages when I tried to get him to admit it. That was when I left his employ …’

‘Did he often have these rages?’ I asked.

‘The chemicals he used to produce his oliphantypes were dangerous,’ he said.
‘Very
dangerous. I witnessed the damage they were causing.’ He shook his head. ‘Clouds of
mercury vapour, cyanide, ether … Noxious toxins, Mr Grimes, all of them, and they did great damage to Laurence’s personality.’

He shook his head regretfully, and frowned.

‘When I first met him,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘Laurence Oliphant was a quiet, mild-mannered man, generous and sympathetic to others. But as time passed, he became increasingly ill-tempered. Moody. Volatile. He would sulk morosely for hours, then explode into violent rage. He was always tired, but unable to sleep. He lost his appetite. And his hands, once so steady as they worked with the dangerous chemicals, developed a fine tremor that left him clumsy and accident-prone.’ He turned and walked back along the attic. ‘And every mishap he had would leave him more mistrustful and suspicious of those around him. Eventually, I found his rages and accusations intolerable, so I left and set up my own
business – which is what you see before you.’

‘How did Laurence view this competition?’ I asked.

Miles Morgenstern smiled wryly. ‘Much as I’d expected. He went berserk.’ His brow furrowed. ‘He shook his fist at me and shouted that I’d be sorry. It was the last time I saw him, although his premises are only a few streets away.’

We had reached the front door, which he pulled open. I stepped outside.

‘Such a waste of a brilliant mind,’ he mused. ‘Such a terrible loss …’

I shook his hand and was about to set off down the stairs, when a thought occurred to me. I turned back.

‘How did you become Laurence’s assistant in the first place?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I thought you’d have known that,’ Miles Morgenstern smiled good-naturedly, his blue eyes bulging from behind his
spectacles. ‘His sister, Clarissa, introduced me. You see, she was my governess in my younger days. She taught me to fence.’

Three names, three different stories, yet from my enquiries I’d learned that they were connected by Laurence Oliphant’s sense of grievance against each of them. But there was a fourth name on the list that Clarissa Oliphant had given me; that of Dean Henry Dodson, Laurence’s influential tutor at university.

The following day, I travelled up the river by flat-bottomed barge to the leafy banks and lawns of the ancient university Laurence had attended, and visited his old college. But all I could discover of Laurence’s tutor was that he had gone on indefinite leave, a simple notice to this effect, written in his own hand, having been found nailed to the door of his study. The college authorities seemed remarkably untroubled by this turn of events. From what
I could gather, they disapproved of the dean’s interest in photography – among other things – and seemed happy to see the back of him.

A firebrand orator and scourge of the university authorities, the dean attracted a loyal band of devoted followers from among the students he taught. These self-styled ‘Dodson’s Diehards’ took their lead from the dean, experimenting in the ancient arts of alchemy and the occult, as well as the very latest fields of interest, such as photography. Most loyal and vocal of Dodson’s Diehards, I discovered from a sleepy college bursar, was Laurence Oliphant himself, before he left the university to practise law.

Later on, as the bursar snored in his gatehouse, I slipped away and headed back to the city, placing a frayed card in the third left-hand pocket of my new poacher’s waistcoat. It was the very card that had been nailed to Dean Henry Dodson’s door, and that the bursar kept in a drawer of his desk:

It had been a busy few days; yet, as I turned the corner of Caged Lark Lane and headed for my rooms, I realized I was no nearer to finding Laurence Oliphant’s murderer than I had been when I left Clarissa Oliphant in Whitegate Prison. I was just about to climb a drainpipe when a newspaper vendor’s guttural cry made me stop dead in my tracks.

‘Read all about it! Tragic death of high society painter! Sir Crispin Blears killed!’

H
aving bought a copy of the
Midtown Scrivener
from the paperlad on the corner, I entered number 3 Caged Lark Lane and headed up the stairs to my rooms in the attic. I slipped my key into the lock and heard the sound of Kaiser’s warning bark, and opened the door to see the loyal creature standing in the middle of the room, staring at me. As he clapped eyes on me, his tail started wagging and he trotted towards me.

‘Good lad,’ I told him, ruffling his tousled head.

I was pleased he was there. After the day I’d had, I didn’t feel like being alone. Once he
was settled on the rug in front of a roaring coal fire, I pulled up an armchair, kicked off my highstacking boots and scrutinized the front page of the newspaper:

Kaiser gave a contented sigh and rolled over on the rug.

‘Sleep well,’ I whispered, placing the fireguard in front of the fireplace. ‘Tomorrow, you and I are going for a walk in Batavia Park.’

The next morning, after sharing a frying pan of breakfast sausages with my Moravian boarhound, the two of us set off for Batavia Park. Half an hour later, we arrived outside Sir Crispin Blears’ Moorish mansion.

A dark stain in the dusty street outside marked the spot where the portrait painter had met with his fatal accident – though a restless night of tossing and turning had convinced me that there was more to this than met the eye, and I was anxious to inspect
the scene. As if to confirm my suspicions, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see the frowning face of Sir Crispin Blears’ butler, Carruthers.

‘You’re that tick-tock lad,’ he croaked, ‘that visited the master a few days ago.’

I confirmed to him that I was.

‘The master was most unsettled following your visit, Mr Grimes, and no mistake,’ the old butler told me, his brow furrowed with concern. ‘Then the day before yesterday, I came into his studio and found him staring out of the window. All at once, he gave a cry of recognition and rushed out of the house. I went to the window, just in time to see a curious, hunched figure beckoning to him from the street. The master ran towards him and then …’

‘And then, what?’ I said.

Carruthers stared down at the stain in the dust.

‘The master grasped the cloak the figure
wore,’ he said, ‘which seemed to come away in his hands, and I lost sight of the wearer. As I watched, the master, clutching the cloak, rose up in the air and then toppled into the street, just as the three o’clock post coach galloped past …’

The old butler trembled. He was still clearly traumatized by what he had witnessed. I took him by the arm and guided him back towards his former employer’s mansion.

‘I don’t suppose,’ I said gently, ‘that you have the cloak in question?’

Carruthers shuddered violently, then nodded. ‘I prised the garment from my master’s cold, dead hands, Mr Grimes, before the undertakers took his poor, broken body away.’

He entered the mansion and shuffled across the tiled hallway and through a door. Moments later, he returned holding a dusty, blood-stained cloak of worsted tweed. He handed it to me. Kaiser’s disquiet increased,
and he whined and snarled, his fur bristling as he sniffed the hem of the cloak.